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Essay: Social context of language and computers

For the last assignment, you will write an essay that discusses the
ethical and social issues that arise with respect to one of the topics
from the course. Read ALL of the following instructions and make
sure you follow them. The instructions are here to help you do
a good job and get a good grade, not because I enjoy being so explicit…

You must submit a hard copy and email a PDF or Word copy to me and
the TA.

Warning: DON'T PLAGIARIZE. The penalties set out by the
university for plagiarism are quite heavy. I’m a computational linguist
with access to plenty of resources for comparing different texts, so it
probably is a bad idea to try it here…

it has appropriate structure,
including introduction, body, and conclusion. Check out these tips on
essay writing.

it references at least two relevant
outside sources: one or both must be a book or journal article and one
may be a magazine article (not a Wikipedia page or general website). For
magazines, publications like Scientific American are
appropriate, but ones like People are not. (Ask if you
aren't sure.) More than one reference may be used. Don't just
add bibliographic entries at the end of the essay – they should be
cited in context, within the essay in the portion(s) of the essay it is
relevant for, as well as having a bibliography at the end (and not as
footnotes). Some useful resources for finding outside sources: UT Library, Google Scholar, Google Books.

it is typed (hand-written essays
won’t be considered)

it is free of spelling and grammar
errors (make sure to proof read it)

it is double-spaced

Examples of thesis statements include:

Better question answering systems
will help people find and maintain jobs by providing quicker and more
efficient access to information.

Better question answering systems
will lead to massive job losses by providing quicker and more efficient
access to information.

Document classification and other
automated filtering techniques threaten to undermine privacy rights by
allowing massive amounts of personal information to be searched quickly
and enabling decisions to be made automatically about that information
without human oversight.

Dialog systems will never be
accepted on a wide-scale because people will never be comfortable
dealing with machines that are not conscious.

Machine translation will
revolutionize the way we are able to share information across cultures
and languages by allowing people around the world to quickly communicate
with one another without the need for human translators.

As you can see, you can argue one way or the other – the important thing
is to back up your chosen thesis.